by Josh Dean
DEDICATION
FOR GILL AND CHARLIE,
AND ESPECIALLY MY MOM,
WHO LOVED SO MANY THINGS,
INCLUDING WORDS AND DOGS
CONTENTS
Dedication
Preface
1 Wildwood
2 Hello, Jack, Meet the World
3 Jack’s Mom, Human Variety
4 The Road to a Championship Starts with a Single Point
5 White Plains: Meeting the Menagerie
6 Heather and Jack
7 Fantastically Rich People Do the Darnedest Things: A Brief History of Dog Shows
8 Westminster: Welcome to the Big Time, Kid
9 How the Hell Does a Wolf Become a Pekingese? A Brief History of Purebreds
10 York
11 Pardon Me While I Fondle Your Dog’s Testicles: Show-Dog Judging Explained
12 Edison
13 And Now a Brief Interlude Featuring the Perez Hilton of Dog Shows
14 The Campaign: I’ll Take Thirty-four Consecutive Back Covers of Dog News, Please
15 Meet Ron Scott, Show-Dog Investor
16 Harrisonburg
17 Like Walking Energy on a Leash
18 Welcome, Halle B
19 Stayin’ Alive (Often with Great Effort): Breeding Ain’t Always Pretty
20 Delaware and Beyond: The Slump Begins
21 Oyster Bay
22 Freehold
23 Ludwigs Corner
24 Do Dogs Actually Like Dog Shows?
25 New Paltz
26 Jack and Summer
27 Bel Alton
28 Bloomsburg
29 August: All Is Not Lost (Yet)
30 Hey, Puppies!
31 Deep into the Heart of Texas
32 Bloomsburg (Again)
33 Philadelphia
34 A Quick Lesson in Poor Sportsmanship: The Battle for (and Insanity over) Number One
35 Go West, Young Jack
36 Wildwood: Once More, with Feeling
37 Last Stop, Westminster
38 The End. For Now. (Maybe?)
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Finally, A Thoroughly Random Collection of Purebred-Dog Marginalia
Picture Section
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
* * *
This is an expensive sport, and there is little financial reward
—DAVID FREI, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS FOR, AND THE FACE AND VOICE OF, THE WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW
Like everybody else in the world, I got started by buying a dog and getting talked into going to a dog show and winning a ribbon and getting hooked for life.
—PAT HASTINGS, TOP DOG-SHOW JUDGE, HANDLER, EXPERT
* * *
The American Kennel Club history books will know him as Grand Champion Wyndstar’s Honorable Mention, but you can call him Jack. That’s what his mom calls him. Not his biological mother, of course. That would be Champion Wyndstar’s Enough Said—or Gracie—and she’s a dog.* Nor his mom Kerry Kirtley, the California woman who bred and nurtured him in his earliest days, or Heather Bremmer, the professional handler who trains and cares for him when he’s making the rounds of America’s East Coast dog-show circuit. No, I mean his mom Kimberly Smith, who first glimpsed a brown-eyed ball of spotted fur on a Web site during a low moment in her life and decided, That’s it. That’s him. That’s my dog. She’s the one who named him Jack.
Jack is a purebred Australian shepherd, America’s twenty-sixth-most-popular breed and neither a particularly new or old one in the grand scheme of things. He is a resident of Pennsylvania and, sometimes in spite of himself, an exemplar of a very special kind of dog: a purebred who participates in the sport of conformation, which you and I know more colloquially as a dog show.
If you, like me, are an outsider to this world, it’s easy to laugh at people who meticulously groom their dogs and put them on display, and to dismiss their “sport,” as they call it, as a subculture that occupies only a tiny slice of America’s attention—something akin to Renaissance fairs or sci-fi conventions—but the numbers suggest otherwise. There are more than eleven thousand dog shows sanctioned by the American Kennel Club, and an estimated 2 million of the 20 million purebred dogs in the United States participate in them. So yes, dog showing may be a subculture, but it’s a mighty big one.
For at least the last five years, the notion of telling a show dog’s story has nipped at my ankles. These most-doted-on specimens are so much like the dogs that amble around our lives—unconditionally lovable, irrepressibly mischievous—and yet at the same time so different—well traveled, hypertrained, pampered beyond imagination. They are, as I would find out, just regular old dogs with a lot of fancy trappings.
The real problem with embarking on such a project was that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to focus on one specific individual. Out of 2 million dogs and 167 AKC-recognized breeds,* many of which I had never heard of, the thought of selecting one was daunting; it felt a little like singling out one flower in a field of thousands. Yes, it’s beautiful and smells great, but so do all the others. What makes this one so special?
And that’s where I was when I wandered into the 2009 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with no clear plan, without even the vaguest notion of how it all worked—the elaborate point systems, the champions, the grand champions, the nuances of bone and structure that would give me night sweats over the months to come—and at an early press conference I met a Sussex spaniel named Frank. It was the first I’d ever heard of a Sussex spaniel, and this one just happened to be featured because his owners were New Yorkers and thus a good match for the local reporters in attendance.
* * *
SUSSEX SPANIEL
A Sussex is like a stocky cocker spaniel, with a thick head, long floppy ears, and a beautiful red coat. Members of this breed have the rare ability, Frank’s owner told me, to sit up on their haunches, with the top half of their torso upright, front limbs dangling, for as long as an hour at a time. I’m not sure why this is a useful skill for a dog, or how the hell it ever developed in the first place, but hers demonstrated. The trick was impressive, not to mention adorable, to witness.
Two days later the Sussex spaniel was a famous breed, after an eleven-year-old named Stump emerged from retirement to become the oldest champion in Westminster history, winning the Best in Show title (BIS) in front of fifteen thousand spectators at Madison Square Garden and eventually landing on the cover of AARP magazine. He had droopy ears and droopier eyes, and I couldn’t help but imagine the voice of the cartoon character Deputy Dawg as Stump lumbered around the show ring, winning the biggest prize in the sport over more heavily favored, styled, and coddled dogs like a standard poodle, a giant schnauzer, and a Scottish terrier.
To this point I’d been stressing over how to choose a dog. Stump answered that for me. It didn’t matter. Any one of them can be a good story. You just never know. As you’ll see with Jack.
The truth is, I had no idea what to expect when a series of connections led me to Heather Bremmer and Kevin Bednar, a husband-wife handling team, who in turn led me to one of their client dogs, a not-even-two-year-old Australian shepherd owned by a single mother from Pennsylvania.
Jack was, I thought, a good representative of what I’ll call the accessible show dog—undeniably beautiful and special even among other top dogs in his breed—but also a family dog first and foremost. My hope was that his story would be more representative of the experience of the average dog-show enthusiast, the person who loves the sport, and all that goes with it, but doesn’t have the bank account to run ads and jet around the country piling up points in pursuit of Best in Show ribbons at major events like Westm
inster.
On the other hand, it also wasn’t impossible that Jack could develop into a star dog in his own right; even without a major financial backer behind him, he stood a very good chance of becoming one of America’s best Australian shepherds, and also just maybe a contender in the Herding Group, one of the seven groups into which show dogs are divided.
Part of the fun in choosing an unknown dog was exactly that: the unknown.
Over the many months I spent reporting this book, one question in particular seemed to arise whenever the subject came up: Will it be like Best in Show? That Christopher Guest film, released in 2000, had a profound effect on the way Americans view the dog-show world—people seem to think that, having seen it, they are intimately familiar with this world, which they will almost certainly call “crazy” or some variant of that adjective (“nuts,” “freaky,” etc.). The more surprising thing for me, though, was that so many dog-show people wondered the same thing. Some as a toe-in-the-water measure of what I was up to: Did I mean to make fun of them and expose them as a community of weirdos? Others merely to suggest that it was maybe a touch mean-spirited but that it was also spot-on. Doug Johnson, a breeder of rare spaniels who has twice won Westminster—he bred Stump—perhaps said it best. “It’s so close to the truth that it’s not even funny.”
Earlier on the day of Stump’s surprise triumph, I met a handler who was about to show an American Staffordshire terrier that had been bred in Thailand but whose owners had dispatched him by air freight to the United States to achieve his AKC championship. Dog showing is a global phenomenon, and Asia is the fastest-growing region for the sport. But America, he said, was still the promised land; the only true measure of a purebred’s greatness is for him to succeed in America. This handler proceeded to tell me he had heard that owners of a few of the previous year’s top dogs had spent at least half a million dollars in expenses, and probably more. “This is crazy, the things people do for show dogs,” said the handler of a dog flown in from Thailand—alone—in pursuit of ribbons. When I told him about my book project, he laughed. “It’s probably going to be called Why Are We So Crazy?”
Clearly there’s something about dogs that brings out the best and worst in us. Over and over I found myself explaining to outsiders the obsessive and occasionally psychotic behavior of dog-show participants by comparing it to the way we act in regard to our children. Go to a Little League game and watch the parents. Emotion makes us irrational—we suspend good sense—and the only thing besides a child that can make an otherwise normal adult human act this way is a dog. We created them, after all, and there are today more pet dogs in the world than there are babies—more than 500 million at last count. I may not have a dog at the moment, but I do have a son, born while I was working on this book, and although he’s still not coordinated enough to swing a bat or throw a ball in its intended direction, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes catch myself projecting great athletic ability upon his wild swats and tosses.
There are people who claim that dogs are our greatest invention. Having spent more than a year observing, reading about, and generally obsessing over them, I find it hard to argue this point. Spaceships and mainframes make for awkward bedmates, and there is no other thing that so willingly—and happily—does what we ask, even when what we are asking is seemingly unpleasant. There’s a story that stands out in my mind because it says so much about dogs, and about us.* The story goes that a man decided for whatever reason that he needed to get rid of his dog. So, being a devious and deeply flawed human,* he urged the animal into a rowboat, paddled out into a lake, and cast the dog overboard in an attempt to drown it. In the process of perpetrating this atrocity, the man fell overboard, and because he couldn’t swim, he began to drown. If you have a dog or have spent much time around one, I probably don’t need to finish this story. You know exactly what happened. The dog saved the man’s life.
My point? Dogs are awesome. And that’s the real reason people enter them in dog shows.
I am a dog person without a dog. I grew up with a mutt named Heidi and had Percy, an English setter, in high school, but I haven’t lived with a dog since college, when I shared a run-down student apartment with an adorable and utterly untrained mutt named Whitney, who smelled like a compost bin, regularly crapped on our living-room carpet, ran around campus with a pack of other unruly mutts owned by drunken Hacky Sack enthusiasts, and then vanished into the Rocky Mountains when her owner, my former roommate, moved west. The fact that my intervening fifteen years have been dogless has nothing to do with Whitney and everything to do with New York City. Small apartments, late nights, frequent travels—all these things conspired against adoption, but I’ve lingered around the fences of New York City’s dog parks for years, envious of the relationships inside. It’s very possible this book is a direct result of that.
—JOSH DEAN, SEPTEMBER 2011
CHAPTER ONE
Wildwood
* * *
Show dogs are just pets that get to go to dog shows. The ring is just a small part of their lives.
—BILL MCFADDEN, DOG HANDLER
* * *
The parking lot outside the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey, greets visitors with a sign that reads NO CAMPERS, RVS, BUSES. But that hasn’t stopped the lot from filling up with all three. The dog show has come to town.
If you were to arrive between Memorial Day and Labor Day, this famously kitschy Jersey Shore town would be packed with sun-scorched families gnawing at clouds of cotton candy as they prowl the boardwalk from musty fun house to rickety carnival ride, between stops for funnel cakes and old-timey photos. But in early February it is a ghost town of more than two hundred shuttered-for-the-season fifties-era doo-wop motels and motor inns with names that seem to have been plucked from whatever list casino builders use: Lu Fran, Star Fire, Jolly Roger, Sand Dune, Sea Chest, Ala Kai, Beau Rivage, Tangiers, et cetera.
Though the town’s population can swell to 250,000 or more over the Fourth of July weekend, the year-round residents number just 5,436. And if dog-show week is any indication, 5,400 or so of those must fly south for the winter along with the birds. Wildwood in winter is so deserted that the city actually turns off the streetlights, and you could take a nap in the middle of the main beach road and probably have to get up only once or twice a day to let a car roll by.
So there’s more than enough room in the convention center’s parking lot for the SUVs, vans, box trucks, and RVs that ferry around America’s show dogs and their human attendants. To walk the parking lot at a dog show is to see every possible seven-letter-or-less dog-related word applied in license-plate form: DOGRUN, DROOLRS, PAWSRUS, LAB LVR, FIDOFUN, DOG MOM . . .
If the plate doesn’t give it away, you can almost always discern a vehicle owner’s breed of choice by the silhouette stickers that adorn it—hulking Great Danes, elegant Afghans, the wispy Gremlin ears of a papillon. The lot is also a good place to tour the taxonomy of America’s recreational vehicles, many hooked up to power—usually in limited supply, and only by advance reservation—and most adjacent to sawdust-lined pens that serve as combination exercise area and dog potty. (Dog shows have official, shared-use versions of these fenced areas, by the way. They’re known as “ex-pens” and are used as indoor bathrooms. They are unisex, though at bigger shows there’s sometimes one reserved exclusively for bitches in heat.)*
Other vehicles come emblazoned with the names of professional handlers, or of kennels, or of the many businesses that chase show dogs and their owners around. For instance, Lil’ Pals, “a pet portrait studio that comes to you,” offering the sort of high-concept photography displayed on the side—say you’d like to see your Pomeranian with angel wings, or your bichons frises imagined as a blissful couple on their wedding day, complete with tux and veil.
The convention center itself can’t be more than a few years old. It’s a concrete-and-steel leviathan parked on the precipice of Wildwood’s famous 2-mile boardwalk, and you h
ave to imagine that a few doo-wop motels came down to make room for it.
Inside, it’s vast and sterile, and the most complimentary thing you can say about its architectural design is that there really isn’t any. Outside, on dog show week, the beach was still covered from the last unexpected snow, and people inside were muttering into cell phones about contingency plans if the local weathermen were right and a giant storm that newscasters had already dubbed both “the Snowpocalypse” and “Snowmageddon” were to arrive.
People will often refer to a dog show by a singular name—in this case “the Wildwood show”—but that’s actually a little misleading. Each day is its own show, sponsored by a different kennel club, and so even a single weekend combines two shows into what has become known as a “cluster,” a trend that arose in the 1970s in response to the Arab oil embargo. Prior to that initiative, exhibitors had to pack up and move to a new location every day, but the gas crisis caused the AKC to ask local kennel clubs to work together so that two or three or four of them from a particular region would meet and stage shows at a single, central location. Hence the cluster.
